The Kids Are Gonna Ask

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The Kids Are Gonna Ask Page 25

by Gretchen Anthony


  “Whoa.” This hadn’t been what he was talking about at all. He’d been talking about the increasingly graphic links Sam Tamblin had been sending for the Guava Media podcast, It’s Only Murder. Most were so gory they came with an Explicit Content warning.

  Nadine went on. “There are one or two others that caught my eye, too, but I’d probably have more luck finding them on a computer. My screen’s too small for all this scrolling.”

  Thomas suddenly couldn’t get back home fast enough.

  NICO:

  DUDE! I know you’re home. Come over

  NICO:

  I’m level 54 on RedZoneSix

  NICO:

  It’s pretty much all I have to do this summer since you got famous

  NICO:

  You know cross-country practice starts next week, right?

  NICO:

  If you’re not there, I’ll know you’re too fat to run

  Forty

  Thomas

  Thomas and Nadine made it back from their walk just before lunch. Chef Bart was out at the farmers market, and Savannah and Maggie were nowhere to be seen. Nadine took Katherine Mansfield into the mudroom to clean her paws and get her fresh water, and Thomas offered to make sandwiches.

  First, he checked the phone for voice mails. Nothing.

  “I make a decent turkey and cheese,” he called to Nadine. “Anything fancier and it’d probably turn into a mess.”

  Nadine said turkey and cheese would be great.

  He had his head in the refrigerator when the home phone rang.

  All thoughts of investigating Sam Tamblin’s social media fled from Thomas’s mind.

  He ran to the phone, leaving the fridge open, the cold air rushing his legs. “McClair residence,” he said. His hand was shaking, and he didn’t even know who he was talking to yet. Could be a reporter. Could be an obscene call. Could be Jack.

  “Yeah, um, I’m returning a call from Thomas? He left a message at my office. And I’m returning it. The call, that is.”

  The voice on the line paused, and Thomas realized with a jolt who it had to be.

  “Sorry,” the man said. “I’ve never done this before. I mean, not make a phone call. I’ve done that, obviously. Just, this situation...”

  “Jack?” His voice came out like a croak. “This is Thomas.”

  Talking to him was like an out-of-body experience. He had this average-guy voice. A total surprise. Thomas always imagined a deep, Ten Commandments-ish voice. Like James Earl Jones as Darth Vader, without the freakish wheezing and death threats. But Jack sounded just like Jack. He didn’t have any sort of an accent despite living in Georgia, and for a minute Thomas panicked that he wouldn’t recognize his voice if he ever got to talk to him again.

  He got ahold of himself enough to tell Jack why he’d reached out. “I’m really sorry we got you into this mess. Did you get my emails? And—I’m sorry I didn’t tell Savannah. I’m sorry you didn’t know about us... I guess I’m just sorry for everything.”

  “Seems like that’s an awful lot for a seventeen-year-old kid to be sorry for,” Jack said.

  “That’s not even the half of it. And when I stopped getting emails from you, I just assumed you were mad at me.”

  “I didn’t get your emails. Long story. But you don’t have to worry. I’m not mad.”

  Thomas felt a weight lift from his shoulders he hadn’t realized was there. He took a deep breath. “A lot’s happened, Jack.”

  “Sounds like. That why you called?”

  Thomas told him all of it—Savannah getting ambushed on national TV and the whole world after them and the neighborhood on lockdown.

  About Thomas feeling pissed off and awful and helpless about all of it.

  “I take it you’re a fixer, huh?” Jack said.

  Thomas wanted to say, No, I’m not. But then, maybe he was. Or wanted to be, at least. After all, if you can’t fix something when it breaks, what’s the point of having it?

  That’s when Jack told him where he was headed. “My family is in Colorado. Wheat farmers. Unlike you, I haven’t been trying to fix anything with my folks for years. So, I’ve got some work to do. But after that—”

  He stopped, and Thomas knew what he was going to say. At least he hoped he knew, and the adrenaline kicked in so hard he thought he was going to punch Jack through the phone if he didn’t.

  “Well, this isn’t something I should ask you. I really ought to talk to your grandmother, first.”

  That, well, made sense.

  Jack, as a person, just made sense to Thomas.

  This call could have gone so wrong. He could have been an asshole—screamed at Thomas or hired a lawyer or gone crying to the media like Brynn. But Thomas never even considered the possibility that he would. Why?

  “In the meantime,” Jack said, “I was thinking I’d reach out to Savannah directly. Send her a letter. Just wanted you to know, so you’re not surprised.”

  “Yeah. Of course. I mean, whatever you want to do.” He paused and gave him the address. “Be nice to her, Jack. Not that I think you wouldn’t be... It’s just—” He looked down at the table and, for the first time, saw the turkey sandwich in front of him. He hadn’t made it. Which meant Nadine had, even though now she was nowhere to be seen. “It’s just that I’ve been sort of amazed at how mean people can be, and it’s better to be around decent people.”

  “Well, if my life is any indication, decent people tend to pop up when you need them. Even sometimes when you don’t deserve them.”

  Thomas was still thinking about those words when Jack sounded ready to hang up.

  “Wait—Jack. I’ve been trying to tell Savannah everything I know about you. Where you’re from, all that stuff you told me. And she keeps asking me if you and Mom kept in touch. I said I didn’t think so because you were going to New Zealand or whatever. Right?”

  Jack cleared his throat and Thomas was afraid he’d crossed some sort of line. After a beat of silence, he asked again, anyway. “Right, Jack?”

  “No, that’s right,” Jack finally answered. “I wanted to travel, and your mom encouraged me to. So, yeah, that was part of the reason. But also, your mom was in love with someone else. She told me before she left, and I wasn’t about to break that up.”

  Thomas fell into his chair. Stars began to dance in front of his eyes, blurring his vision. “She what?”

  Jack blew out a heavy breath. “Geez, Thomas. I never... I shouldn’t have—”

  “No, right. We knew that.” They didn’t, of course. Not even close. “He and Mom didn’t get married. Mom was too busy with us to date and all that.” Thomas was seeing double.

  “You okay, Thomas?”

  “Yeah!” His voice sounded like somebody else’s. “Of course! So great to talk to you, Jack. Thanks for calling. For sure write that letter to Savannah. She’d love it.”

  Then, for the first time in his whole life, Thomas hung up on his father.

  Forty-One

  Maggie

  Maggie lay in bed, not sleeping. She’d gone to bed hours ago and still, not even a wink of rest. She sat up, turned on the lamp and pulled her dog-eared copy of Zorba the Greek from the bedside table.

  But that only made her hungry for spanakopita.

  She slammed the book shut and grabbed her journal. There was so much she hadn’t been able to bring herself to think about, much less record, and perhaps this was why sleep eluded her.

  She put pen to page. “RE: PODCAST.” She always wrote her headlines in block letters. “IMPORTANT CONSIDERATIONS...”

  And that’s when she heard them—voices in the kitchen. She threw on her kimono and hustled downstairs before her brain got smart enough to stop her. She flipped on the kitchen light and startled. “Oh!”

  Thomas and Savannah huddled together at the table.
>
  “Hey, Maggie,” they said.

  “Apparently I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t sleep.” She kissed the top of Thomas’s curls and ran a hand across Savannah’s shoulders, sitting down next to her. “What has the two of you awake tonight?”

  Thomas shrugged and bobbed his head, acknowledging her question while giving nothing of substance away in return.

  Maggie suddenly understood. “Ah. You weren’t expecting me.”

  Savannah sighed and shot her brother a look. “We may as well get to it.”

  Thomas glared back, unblinking, until he surrendered and spit out the news. “I spoke to Jack Thorson today. I was just telling Van about our conversation.”

  Maggie flushed. “As in, John James Thorson?”

  “Yeah.”

  “On the phone?”

  “Yep.” There was an edge to Thomas’s voice. A tone that said Are you sure you want to start this? He went on, anyway. “We’d been emailing, you know. But after Savannah got so upset, I felt like I had to do something. So, I tracked him down.”

  Maggie’s breath stalled in her throat and she had to get herself a glass of water to push it down.

  Thomas said, “You look surprised.”

  She took a long drink and returned to her chair. “I ought to be angry. You took things to a whole new level without my knowledge.”

  She wasn’t mad at them, of course. Not really. She just had this sinking feeling that they knew now. That her grandchildren knew the same thing Jack Thorson knew and that Maggie had never told. Because they were still children, and because children didn’t need to know that about their mother.

  It’s not that big of a deal, Mom, Bess whispered.

  Maggie shushed her with a flick of the wrist. “Never mind me. If I’m mad at anyone, I’m mad at myself. I wanted to give you both your independence, to let you do this search in your own way. But I’m not sure you were ready. That any of us were.” She fiddled with her robe, cinching it tight. Then tighter again. “Let’s just say that this whole affair has forced me to face certain realities that are...uncomfortable.”

  Thomas nodded, acting as if he understood, even though Maggie knew there was no way he could.

  “Like what?” Savannah asked.

  Maggie gave her a tight smile. “Oh, nothing.” She picked up her glass and held it at the ready. “Let’s talk about Jack. Tell me everything.” She took a pointedly long drink.

  Thomas started at the beginning. He told her about their early emails and how he’d hunted Jack down on Tybee Island until he found someone who could pass along his phone number.

  “It was amazing to actually hear him on the other end of the line,” he said. “I mean, it’s like it was—” He stopped, wide-eyed.

  “Fate?” Maggie said. Her throat was thick with anxiety and it came out more of a croak.

  Thomas and Savannah exchanged smiles, and the light on their faces made Maggie’s heart dance—literally. The rhythm pounding her chest was “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.”

  Thomas’s expression darkened. “He also told me that Mom was in love with someone else when they met. It’s part of the reason why they didn’t keep in touch.”

  At this, Savannah looked Maggie directly in the eye. “Is that true?”

  “Oh.” Maggie was lucky she was no longer swallowing, or she would have choked. She scolded herself for being surprised. Good grief. She’d known where this conversation was going. And was it such a terrible thing? Their mother had fallen in love with a man who was in no way her equal. A man named Tad. Who names their son Tad, anyhow?

  Just tell them, whispered Bess.

  Let me do this my way. Maggie cleared her throat with another sip of water. “Yes. It didn’t work out.”

  Savannah snickered. “Obviously.”

  It wasn’t nearly as obvious as Savannah imagined.

  “They went to high school together,” Maggie continued. “Head over heels for each other their whole senior year. But when college came, he went off to California and she stayed here in Minnesota. Bess was brokenhearted about the breakup. But your grandfather and I assured her that if they were really meant to be together, they’d still be in love after they graduated.” Her body shuddered at the memory of that conversation. Bess, positively distraught, convinced she’d never love anyone again the way she loved Tad.

  “Was he nice?” Thomas asked.

  Maggie closed her eyes quickly, before he could see her reaction. Nice wasn’t the issue. Tad was weak. Weak and dishonest, a man who tried to account for his lack of spine by calling it “moral character.”

  “They...were...just not right for each other.” That was as much as she planned to say about dear old Tad.

  But there was something else. One more thing they needed to know. She opened her eyes. “He was not your father. I asked your mother explicitly and she was very clear.”

  Of course she’d asked.

  “Mother,” Bess had scolded. As if this weren’t a perfectly appropriate question, considering the situation. “Not that I should have to prove anything, but Tad and I have lived two thousand miles apart for four years.”

  “Are you certain?” Maggie urged her to be one hundred percent sure.

  But Bess had only gotten more upset. “Are you suggesting he FedEx’d me his sperm?”

  Maggie searched her grandchildren’s faces, desperate to understand what they needed to hear. What would make this not so confusing for them. “Your mother never hesitated in her decision to keep you. Not once. You were the loves of her life.”

  “I know,” Thomas said, sounding like he meant it, and Maggie softened at the calm in his voice. He was handling this, processing it in his Thomas-like way.

  Then Savannah. “It’s just... I can’t help but feel like it’s our fault. Like, if she wouldn’t have made the mistake with us, she would have had a husband and a whole other family.”

  Maggie’s mouth fell open, shocked. The hair on the back of her neck stood up and she had to stop herself from leaping out of her chair. “No! Your mother got pregnant unexpectedly, but the two of you were never a mistake!” Behavior was a mistake. Choices, a mistake. The only mistake Bess made was to love a weak boy like Tad.

  Because she had still loved him. Even after four years apart. Even after other boyfriends, and travel, and a life of her own. She was planning to move to San Francisco as soon as she graduated, and Tad was planning to meet her there. They were going to try to pick up where they left off, see if they’d survived the test. “It’s like you and Dad promised,” Bess had said, calling to share the news with Maggie. “If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be.”

  Only, Bess discovered she was pregnant only a few weeks before graduation. And Tad suddenly discovered a latent moral compass in his soul that would “never allow” him to look at Bess the same way again. He wanted nothing to do with her once he found out she was going to be a mother, refused to raise another man’s child.

  Later, when she said she wanted to keep the baby, Maggie wasn’t about to argue. That “mistake” pregnancy rescued Bess from a life with a man who didn’t deserve her, or her children.

  Friends used to tsk quietly and shake their heads when Maggie told them about Bess’s pregnancy. “No father?” they’d whisper. And Maggie would do her best to disguise her delight when answering, “No. Bess is going to raise them on her own. With my help.”

  Now, sitting in their quiet kitchen, in the very room where Bess had told her about the pregnancy that led to these two wonderful human beings, Maggie felt suddenly desperate. To instill in Thomas and Savannah every ounce of their mother’s love. To ensure they believed in themselves with the same ferocity that Bess had. She had chosen them over him for a reason.

  “I have this memory,” Maggie said, “of standing over your crib when you were newborns. You were so tiny that you slept side by side in the
same bed. We’d put you down every night and then just stand there, marveling.” She felt her eyes glisten. “Bess would say, ‘Look at them, Mom. They’re perfect. Absolutely perfect.’”

  Savannah snorted. “You tell that story a lot.”

  Did she? “Funny, I worry I don’t tell you enough about your mom. That I’m your last connection, and that I’m failing.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t.” Thomas pushed back from the table and his chair screeched across the floor, wood on wood. “I mean, I know you want us to remember her and everything, but sometimes we just want to forget. Except you won’t let us. I’ll finally get to a point where I’m not thinking about her constantly, and then you tell some story about something that happened when we were little and it’s like—argh!” He shoved his hands into his hair and pulled. The edge in his voice was razor sharp. “You want us to hate Mom. That’s what you said, right? You said we had to hate her in order to grow up. So we didn’t get stuck.” He pointed at Maggie. “But how can we do that when you constantly live in the good old days?”

  “That’s not my intention, Thomas.”

  “I know. But it’s like, give me a break, Maggie. The house is either full of strangers or it’s full of ghosts. We’re either eating dinner with someone we’ve never met before, or you’re telling us stories about things that happened forever ago.”

  “I—” Maggie stood, no longer able to stay still. She got up and paced back and forth before spinning back to Thomas and Savannah and saying, “I love to be around people, is all. And I want you to know your family. To know your history. To have a rich community of friends.”

  Thomas pounded a fist on the table. “Then why didn’t you tell us about Mom? Why did we have to hear it from a man we’ve never even met?”

  “Because there are some things that are better not to know!” There, she’d said it. There was no taking it back now.

  Savannah asked, “What else are you keeping from us? Are you dying? Is that why you keep grabbing your chest?”

 

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